1. he divided the children between Leah and Rachel. Again, the principle of binary division running through the whole story comes into play. Here, there is a binary split between the two wives on one side and the two concubines on the other. The former of these categories is itself split between Rachel and Leah. Although the division at this point, unlike the previous day’s division into two camps, appears to be for purposes of display, not defense, it looks as though Jacob retains a residual fear of assault, and so he puts the concubines and their children first, then Leah and her children, and Rachel and Joseph at the very rear.

2. Leah and her children after them. The Masoretic Text reads “last” instead of “after them” (in the Hebrew merely the difference of a suffix), but the context requires “after them,” a reading that is supported by at least one ancient version.

3. bowed to the ground seven times until he drew near. This practice of bowing seven times as one approaches a monarch from a distance was common court ritual, as parallels in the Amarna letters and the Ugaritic documents (both from the middle of the second millennium B.C.E.) indicate.

4. Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell upon his neck. This is, of course, the big surprise in the story of the twins: instead of lethal grappling, Esau embraces Jacob in fraternal affection. The Masoretic Text has both brothers weeping, the verb showing a plural inflection, but some scholars have conjectured that the plural waw at the end of the verb is a scribal error, duplicated from the first letter of the next word in the text, and that Esau alone weeps, Jacob remaining impassive.

5. The children. Jacob’s response makes no mention of the women. It would have been self-evident that the women were the mothers of the children and hence his wives, and one senses that he feels impelled to answer his brother as tersely as possible, not spelling out what can be clearly inferred.

8. What do you mean by all this camp. The Hebrew is literally, “Who to you is all this camp,” but both “who to you” (mi lekha) and “what to you” (mah lekha) have the idiomatic sense of “what do you mean, or want.” “Camp” in this context means something like “retinue” or “procession of people,” but the continuity with the twin camps of the preceding episode is obviously important for the writer.

9. I have much, my brother. Esau in fact has become a kind of prince, despite his loss of birthright and blessing, and he can speak to Jacob in princely generosity. It is striking that he addresses Jacob as “my brother”—the familial term with the first-person possessive suffix is generally a form of affectionate address in biblical Hebrew—while Jacob continues to call him “my lord,” never swerving from the deferential terms of court etiquette.

10. for have I not seen your face as one might see God’s face, and you received me in kindness? This most extravagant turn in the rhetoric of deferential address pointedly carries us back to Jacob’s reflection on his nocturnal wrestling with the nameless stranger: “for I have seen God face-to-face and I came out alive.” “And you received me in kindness” (just one word in the Hebrew) is significantly substituted for “I came out alive,” the very thing Jacob feared he might not do when he met his brother.

11. take my blessing. The word for “blessing,” berakhah, obviously has the meaning in context of “my gift,” or, as Rashi interestingly proposes, invoking as an Old French equivalent, mon salud, my gift of greeting. But the term chosen brilliantly echoes a phrase Jacob could not have actually heard, which Esau pronounced to their father two decades earlier: “he’s taken my blessing” (27:36). In offering the tribute, Jacob is making restitution for his primal theft, unwittingly using language that confirms the act of restitution.

I have everything. Jacob of course means “I have everything I need.” But there is a nice discrepancy between his words and the parallel ones of his brother that is obscured by all English translators (with the exception of Everett Fox), who use some term like “enough” in both instances. Esau says he has plenty; Jacob says he has everything—on the surface, simply declaring that he doesn’t need the flocks he is offering as a gift, but implicitly “outbidding” his brother, obliquely referring to the comprehensiveness of the blessing he received from their father.

13. are my burden. The Hebrew says literally, “are upon me.”

14. at the heels. Literally, “at the foot.”

till I come to my lord in Seir. This is a “diplomatic” offer, for in fact Jacob will head back northward to Succoth, in the opposite direction from Seir.

15. Why should I find such favor in the eyes of my lord? In this protestation of unworthiness, Jacob preserves the perfect decorum of deferential address to the very end of his dialogue with his brother. Clearly, he is declining the offer of Esau’s retainers because he still doesn’t trust Esau and intends to put a large distance between himself and Esau or any of Esau’s men. One should note that the very last word (one word in the Hebrew) spoken by Jacob to Esau that is reported in the story is “my lord.”

17. Succoth. The Hebrew sukkot means “sheds.”

18. came in peace. The adjective shalem elsewhere means “whole,” and this has led many interpreters to understand it here as “safe and sound.” A tradition going back to the Septuagint, and sustained by Claus Westermann among modern commentators, construes this word as the name of a town, Salem, understood to be a synonym for Shechem. (The claim has been made that a tell about two and a half miles from the site of Shechem is the biblical Salem.) But the Salem where Abraham meets Melchizedek is at an entirely different location, and if that were also a designation for Shechem, one would expect here at the very least the explanatory gloss, “Salem, that is, the town of Shechem” (Shalem, hiʾ ʿir Shekhem). Because these three verses are an introduction to the story of the rape of Dinah, where in fact Hamor and Shechem say of the sons of Jacob, “these men come in peace (sheleimim) to us,” it is more likely that “came in peace” is the sense here. Abraham ibn Ezra argues for this meaning, similarly noting the link between the two passages.

when he came from Paddan-Aram. Now that Jacob has at last crossed the Jordan (Succoth is in trans-Jordan) and has taken up residence outside a Canaanite town, the long trajectory of his journey home is completed.

19. a hundred kesitahs. These are either measures of weight for gold and silver, or units for the barter of livestock, or a term derived from the latter that has been transferred to the former. The purchase of real estate, as with Abraham at Hebron, signals making a claim to permanent residence.

20. El-Elohei-Israel. The name means “El / God, God of Israel.” Claus Westermann makes the interesting argument that Jacob marks his taking up residence in Canaan by subsuming the Canaanite sky god in his monotheistic cult: “El, the creator God, the supreme God in the Canaanite pantheon, now becomes the God of the people of Israel.”